Tag: Rez

I have successfully finished yet another garage-shop electronics project that actually WORKS!

Tuesday, Pastor Mike at Rez announced that in two weeks, when they’re on their short-term missions trip to India, they’ll be performing yet another Skype call in to 6:33 pm. However, the last two or three times they’ve been anywhere, they’ve tried this, and every time it’s been a rig. Here’s how they did it: a laptop on their end runs Skype, the Mac computer on our end runs Skype, but the bandwidth is low enough that we can only manage video. The audio cuts in and out. So for audio, we do a regular cellphone call (and use the headphone jack on the phone to pipe it into the sound board at church). And on top of that, we relied on the built-in mic in the cell phone to pick up any audio for the overseas guys to hear. A really poor setup to say the least. And each time, I’ve promised to come up with a better solution for next time.

Well, last night at men’s 6:33 we had our Skype call from Argentina. And it worked…kind of. However, the connection they had down there was extremely poor and our own LAN wasn’t doing so hot for external connections either. However, we did like we had done for when they went to India. We bypassed audio transmission and sent only video through Skype. Then we plugged someone’s Blackberry into the sound board via headphone jack and were able to get audio that way. So Skype for video and Blackberry for audio. It worked fairly well and we were able to get a decent show up on the screen.

So we’re having this BIG thing at church where a group of probably seven to ten guys are going down to Argentina in about a month or so. They’re trying to set it up so that the Tuesday when we’re meeting and they are gone, they’ll Skype us during service and we’ll be able to put it up and talk with them live. I think this is pretty cool. However, we were running into a few security bugs last week when we tested (security locked me out of being able to open Skype up). We’ll be testing it again tomorrow night, and I think the IT guy at church fixed it. Anyway, he said he’d look into it this last week.

Tuesday it was mentioned that I had made chili for the men’s group at church. Well, I was expecting we’d do like we did last year and every table (there are about twenty) would provide their own little mini potluck. Well, it was different in that it was a group-wide potluck in which the entire snack table was cleared off and everybody shared with everybody.

It’s a good thing I made a double batch, because the pot got cleared out very quickly.

In addition to THAT, yesterday I made a gingerbread house and put the pieces in the fridge to cool. Today we went out and bought the stuff I’d expect public school kids to waste their lunch money on when mom isn’t looking…candy. So we now have more candy than is healthy in the house, which is bad bad bad! But nobody’s stealing, so that’s good. So far I’ve assembled the walls and roof and the whole thing is on the verge of collapsing. I think I’ll take the Joy of Cooking’s advice and leave it sit for one to eight hours (eight being preferable). Actually wait. I DID let the walls sit for an hour before I stuck the roof on and that definitely helped. So for now, I’ll let it sit with the roof on for a bit longer than that, put the chimney, doors and shutters in and then start in with the decoration. In either case, we’ll see how it turns out.

So I’d like to take a moment and give my own memorial to Dale Walter who I considered a good friend. Of course, he considered EVERYONE a good friend, but everyone felt speial after talking with him for any length of time. Anyhow, he died in a car wreck last Wednesday and his memorial service yesterday was amazing. Maybe when I get a normal keyboard under my fingers I’ll rehash it all.

So I had this job opportunity open up over the weekend for a janitor position at work. All I have to do is call this one lady at the church. I’m planning on doing that tomorrow morning maybe before school. Boy, I hope I can pick up something.

On another note: we’re heading over to Loveland this evening for a visit with some friends. The excuse is to watch football, but none of us is very into football (even if Dad professes to be a fan). But it’ll be good to visit with those guys anyway.

Yet another note, I tried looking over the jQuery API and couldn’t quite figure it out. In addition to that, I researched Google Chrome theme builders and figured out how to do it manually in addition tothe little programs that do it for you. And, of course, I got all the videos listed below uploaded.

For all you kiddos in Northern Colorado: Resurrection Fellowship in North Loveland is having their annual fall festival. And I’m going to be helping with the building of the human maze. The last two years it has been way overboard (taking up rooms upon rooms upon basements upon auditoriums, etc). So we are toning down this year in order that no one gets lost. So tomorrow night we’re setting up and it should be a good old time on Wednesday night.